Microsoft's new media player won't appeal to everyone, but for those with an …

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When Microsoft first launched the Zune, the player was something of a kludge. The hardware design had been licensed wholesale from Toshiba, and the fact that it had WiFi and could "squirt" songs was little advantage in a world where few people bought the device. (Several years after its launch, I have yet to run across another person "in the wild" who owns a Zune.) As Microsoft's first product that was meant to derail the iPod juggernaut, it served instead only as a sacrificial victim that the juggernaut overran without pity.

But with the second attempt, Microsoft went from competent to very good. Even today, these second-generation devices are a pleasure to use and feature a few neat tricks like WiFi sync. Industrial design was hugely improved versus the first generation, though plastic was still much in evidence, and Microsoft rolled out both flash and hard drive models along with its Zune Originals engraving program. With Zune 1's “squirting” both useless and widely mocked, the company found new a way to capitalize on the second-gen Zune’s WiFi by providing access to streaming music directly from the Zune music store. Users who paid for the $14.99 monthly subscription could access millions of tracks, then stream or download them to the Zune player, all without hooking the device up to a computer.

For its third hardware redesign, Microsoft has given up on the value segment of the market altogether. Instead, the company is rolling out a single flash-based model in 16GB ($220) and 32GB ($290) varieties and loading it up with a few premium features: a 3.3 inch OLED 480x272 screen, support for HD radio, the NVIDIA Tegra HD video playback engine, a touch screen, real metal on the front and back, downloadable apps, and a Web browser. While updated firmware is available for older Zunes as well, the decision to focus on a single model and end-of-life the other Zunes is a chance for Microsoft to reset the Zune line, focus on a single well-made machine with some new capabilities, and see if there is any traction to be had in the market.

Can it succeed? That depends on whether users buy into the Microsoft way of doing things—a way that includes paying for a monthly music subscription. Those who take the bait will find themselves hooked (in both senses) by one of the best portable music discovery experiences yet created. The full subscription experience on the Zune is now unbelievably compelling, offering something that feels like more than the sum of its parts—but consumers have so far shown little interest in subscription music services.

For everyone else, the new Zune HD is “merely” an excellent media player with a gorgeous screen, HD radio, and 720p output over an HDMI connection.

The device

The new Zune HD player is a big step forward for Microsoft’s design. It’s as thick as a USB flash drive in the middle, almost exactly as wide as a credit card, and unexpectedly light. The liberal use of metal keeps this “lightness” from feeling like “cheapness,” and the tolerances and build quality seem quite good.

The effect is marred only when looking at the device from the side. While it is bounded by metal on top and largely covered with a metal plate on the bottom, both sides of the device squeeze in ribbon of black between the silver. The effect is a bit like an inverted Oreo and is not improved by the fact that each black ribbon is inexplicably indented for about half of its length.

On the left side, a button (2) is mounted into the black ribbon, nearly flush with the edge of the unit—which often makes it difficult to push. Further down on the left side is Microsoft’s continued attempt at photocopying Apple’s packaging techniques; a lowercase strip of gray text says (as it has on all past Zunes), “hello from seattle.”

Hi, Seattle.

The top of the device has a flush-mounted power switch (1) that also turns off the screen, while the bottom offers a proprietary Zune connector and a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. The unit’s only other button is a thin rectangle located just below the screen, which functions as a "home" button (3) in the user interface. The internal battery is not user-replaceable.

The older Zune firmware had an attractive “twist” interface, but it has nothing on the new firmware. (While older Zunes did receive a firmware upgrade to 3.2, this did not give them the new Zune HD interface.) The design now is all swooping letters and zooms and fades; it's quite attractive and totally smooth.

The new firmware also has an excellent new chooser interface that will please anyone with a massive music collection. In the past, the only way to access albums beginning with, say, the letter R was to scroll through the entire music collection. Because the scrolling sped up the longer a button was held down, it was nearly impossible to hit a particular letter in this fashion (much less an album or artist), and much scrolling back and forth was required to select a particular item. In the new interface, tapping any of the header letters brings up a set of boxes containing the letters of the alphabet. Press one and the Zune jumps instantly to that letter. It’s far faster and much more accurate than the old approach.

The Zune HD has also fixed an old problem that dogged the hard-drive-based Zunes; when browsing long lists of album art, the drive would spin and the interface would sputter as it tried to load the thumbnails (Cover Flow shows similar problems both on Macs and iPhones). No such problems remain now, and flying through long sets of album covers is quick and hitch-free.

Despite the software’s attractive design, it might also serve as a case study for just how hard it is to nail interface design on a first pass. Moving around in the interface takes a bit of getting used to; for instance, there’s no single way to back out of the menu hierarchy. When viewing the details of an album, backing up requires a press on a white arrow in the upper left corner of the screen. Clear enough. But when you bring up the special player-wide control screen (triggered by that button on the left side of the device) to adjust volume or to pause playback, backing out involves tapping the tiny word “exit” in the upper left. And in most other menu screens, backing out is only accomplished by tapping the bottom of the light grey words (“video” or “songs” or “albums”) that show previous menu selections. After being selected, the newly requested screen appears and the words fly up to and off the top of the screen; backing up means pressing a set of half-amputated letters that can be impossible to read. To get from the "quickplay" screen back to the home screen, one swipes from right to left. Do we need four slightly different ways to accomplish the same thing?

Player controls also don’t exist directly on any menu page; they pop up as an overlay, generally triggered by the button on the left side of the Zune HD (tapping the screen in certain views also brings them up). But this is an absolutely crucial feature, as it’s the only way to change the volume, skip to the next song, or even stop playback. There’s no way to do any of these things without pulling the device out, pressing the button, and manipulating the screen, and it doesn’t help that the left-side button is just a bit too difficult to hit. The more I used this, the more I hated it—a bad sign for something needed so often. When you find yourself rationalizing, "Sure, this song is too loud, but I like it that way," or "Yes, I would prefer to skip ahead to the next track, but that would mean jabbing at the button," you know that usability has taken a punch to the gut.